Guess what? I’m the proud owner of a Ferrari!  I’ve always dreamed of owning one since I was a little kid, but this isn’t the four-wheeled kind – it’s actually a kick-ass monitor!

So how did I end up with Lance Tamashiro’s kick ass Ferrari F22 LCD monitor and who the heck is Lance in the first place? Read on and it all will become clear.

I subscribe to a bunch of lists and somewhere along the line I ended up on Lance Tamashiro’s. He’s an internet marketer that is partners with another guy by the name of Robert Plank. They create their own products like membership cube, webinar crusher and time management on crack (yeah – those are some interesting names!). I’ve been on Lance’s list since last September and have been keeping an eye on the products that he offers and all that, but I haven’t purchased anything from him.

So, out of the blue he sent an email last month saying that he was willing to give away one of his lovely Ferrari 24″ LCD monitors for the winning comment on his blog; to win each person had to share the following:

• Their biggest obstacles
• Some concrete action they’d take by April 30th, 2010
• How the monitor would help them
• A tip that they had that would help others

I was a little curious since this was one of the few offers I’d come across that were 100 percent free (not one of those free + shipping deals), but I wasn’t really all that motivated to get a monitor – it looked nice and all, but I just didn’t have a pressing need to get a new monitor.

However, for some reason my brain was working on exactly what my answers would be if I did reply. I didn’t need the monitor, and the competition would probably be too fierce anyway but I thought this whole process could inspire a blog post for my own blog if nothing else.

The more I thought about it, the more fired up I became. Then I got to the point where I thought posting on my own blog would be a bit of a cop-out because it would be safer; Lance’s blog gets way more traffic, especially with the contest going on.

Lance ran the contest over a week and emailed his list a few times with updates – smart move because it kept me thinking about it even more. I eventually reached the point where my answer was so important and meaningful that I wanted to share it not for the purpose of winning the monitor, but for being true and accountable to myself because I’d gone out on a limb and been truthful and set some deadlines that I had to meet.

By the time I got around to commenting there were well over a hundred responses. Some of the people were using bravado (“you can send the monitor to me now” type of replies) and others were using pity, or playing the “I bought your product” card. I was skeptical that me – a guy who never bought anything from Lance would win.

But as I said, it wasn’t really about winning anymore – it was about being true to myself and taking action on something I had to be accountable for. So I went to his blog and started writing my comment. I knew it was going to be long one, so rather than write directly into the comment window on Lance’s site – I opened up a text file and started typing.

I was distracted a few times, but I saved my work and came back until I had captured what I wanted to say. I stayed up late and went to post my comment and noticed that the option to leave a comment was gone.

Lance had closed the comments!

I double checked the date and saw that I still had about 24 hours or so before the contest closed, what was up with that?

So I emailed Lance about this. I actually got a response back and was impressed. He mentioned later that he got mixed up and closed his contest a day earlier then was listed on his site. He emailed me when it was back up and I was able to copy and paste my response into his site and save it.

About a day or so later, Lance got in touch with me and told me that I won. He thanked me for ‘keeping it real’ in my response. My comment was chosen out of 222 total entries. Not only that, but Lance replied to a good chunk of those comments – something that I’ve rarely seen a ‘guru’ do (not that Lance calls himself that).

I ended up getting the monitor just about two weeks later (about 5 days after my birthday no less) and it arrived in great shape and works terrific. It even puts the monitor I use at work to shame (and I thought it was good before).

So what’s the moral of the story? Get on Lance’s list at (www.lancetamashiro.com) follow your passion and take action. Who knows – you just may end up with a Ferrari yourself one day. Just not mine!

To check out Lance’s post entitled Need A FREE Monitor? and see if you can find my comment in there.

P.S. I did end up meeting my deadline – you better believe that knowing that I won the contest helped to motivate me to hold up my end of the bargain. While I had planned to launch week 1 of a 4 week membership, I ended up having to settle with creating a step by step written tutorial loaded with screen shots hooked up to a Paypal button. Lance told me that challenges always come up and it’s important to work through them; I intend to finish my membership program once I iron out the tech stuff.

P.P.S. I ended up getting a huge spike of traffic (well, for me at least) from Lance, so it’s funny that by taking part in the contest (partly because there was more traffic on Lance’s blog) I ended up getting more traffic to my blog at the same time. There’s a lesson in there!

Screen Toaster allows you to capture the screen on your computer, or you can capture the input from a web camera and upload it online. These are the videos that you’ll often see online used to capture walk-through tutorials, PowerPoint presentation videos and more. These videos are highly prized because they combine audio with video to be able to communicate with thousands of people online as if they were all in the same room with you. Other benefits include the fact that video and audio is much more personal experience than someone would have if they simply read the same information out of an ebook. Your viewers get to hear your voice and get a feel for who you are and the passion that you bring to your topic. This can help you to increase your sales and also the price of your info products if you’re using screen capture videos of just text.

What’s nice about Screen Toaster is that you don’t have to worry about downloading any software onto your computer, you just setup your account and can then login from anywhere you like with an internet connection. You have the option of choosing the whole screen or custom-sizing a rectangle on your screen for the exact area that you want to record for your presentation. Other features include the ability to download the file to your hard drive, the ability to upload to Youtube, to upload to the Screen Toaster website and the ability to download as an swf  or as a mov file. You can record the audio from the video, remove the audio or web cam from the video, add captions plus change the thumbnail for your video.

Using Screen Toaster

The features are nice to be sure, considering that this screencasting software is free. There are no time limits involved either, so you can go right ahead and record a one hour presentation if you like. If you learn how to use the shortcut (alt s to start and stop recording) you can create a decent over the shoulder video capture without having to do a lot of editing, just pause the recording when you switch between windows or take a minute to login to a site. While all of this sounds great, you’ll soon learn that you also get what you pay for with this software. So far, I’ve used Screen Toaster at least 10 times, and my initial attempts were pretty dismal. You have to make sure that each time you start a recording you specify that you want to record audio – it sounds like a no-brainer, but there are times (say after your second or third retake) that you have to resize your screen capture rectangle (unless you want the entire full screen to be captured) and you forget to enable the audio. It can be frustrating when you realize that your 20 minute presentation didn’t consist of any audio!

While it’s nice to have this software load online, for my older and under powered computer running Windows XP I found that I would get errors while recording and lose the entire session as a result. There was no way to know until you were finished – so once again, if you like to ramble for 40 minutes at a time – you may be annoyed at the very end to see the recording had an error.

Lastly, the other troubles you’ll likely encounter is if you attempt to upload or download your file to anywhere but the actual Screen Toaster site. I haven’t managed to successfully upload to Youtube yet, and if you do so before uploading to the Screen Toaster site, you’ll end up losing the entire file. My advice – just upload to the Screen Toaster site, it’s not worth the risk.

Screen Toaster offers free high quality video hosting, so you don’t have to worry about finding a place to host. From there it’s a simple process to copy some embed code to get the video onto your blog. While it is a far from perfect video solution, it’s worked for me a lot better than the free version of Cam Studio that I’ve tried (never seemed to record audio right, no matter what I did). It’s a good piece of software for those that are looking to go beyond having text and into having some more rich content on their website while potentially creating a closer bond to their followers.

Check out Screen Toaster and see what you think.

This is right up there with the blue screen of death

A couple of weeks ago I was messing around inside my webhosting account. My goal was to install a shopping cart so that I could do all kinds of neat things like sell ebooks and memberships while also being able to set people up as affiliates. I managed to install the software and I thought all was well, but I had inadvertently deleted several wordpress databases in the proccess.

What this means is that I had upwards 50 – 60 web pages that I’ve created over the past few years disappear without a trace. It wasn’t bad enough that I did this, I also failed to realize for a day or so that I had just effectively neutered three websites while being so proud of myself for setting up my new shopping cart.

An odd sense of calmness descended on me while I contemplated all the work and effort I’d put into my websites only to see them destroyed instantly with the reckless deletion of databases. I realized that I had been making weekly backups of my main and biggest blog, but I wasn’t sure if I’d have to reinstall WordPress, plus all my plugins and themes and all that. It would be at least an hour or maybe more to get it back up again. Nothing too crazy right? But then it dawned on me to contact my webhosting company – this just happens to be Geekhosting.com, a company that I’ve been using since 2007.

These guys saved my bacon.

I did some research online and learned that if you have a good quality webhost, that they should be taking regular backups of your site and should be able to get your back in mishaps like the one that I caused. However, when I chose Geekhosting a few years ago it wasn’t because of dependability or anything like that – it was all about the price. Geekhosting offered me the most affordable webhosting option for my needs plus they gave deep discounts on paying for a full year at a time. Now I had to see if their service was also up to the task.

I sent in the help ticket, marked it as urgent and crossed my fingers. Within two hours I had a reply from the tech staff that they could restore the databse files so long as I could provide the last four digits of the credit card used to pay for my hosting. Once this number was provided, within 2 or 3 hours the sites were back up like they had never been down.

So anyway, I just wanted to write a post to thank Geekhosting for doing a great job  preventing my own self-induced headaches and lost content. I highly recommend them and guess what – they don’t even have an affiliate program (that I know of) so this post is free and clear of ulterior motives.

Check em out if you’re looking for a new webhosting provider.

Okay, so this post should really be called: Google Wave, what use is a wave when you’re stranded on shore?

You see, here’s my story. I first found out about this thing called Google Wave (already called Gwave for short) by an internet marketer by the name of Howie Schwartz. This guy gives out a lot of great content and somehow managed to put together a product about Gwave before it is even released to the public – how’s that for getting the jump on the competition? Anyway, I watched a webinar on how Google Wave is the future and voted most likely to kill Facebook and I’m thinking – this thing looks pretty cool! Maybe I should try it out too!

So I do a search for Google Wave and find the page online, there’s nothing much there but you can request an invite so that you can start beta testing it for yourself. I did this and by the time I forgot all about it (approximately 2 weeks) I was suddenly welcomed into the Google Wave sandbox to test and try the sucker out. At this point in time I had two people (presumably testers like myself) and a representative from Google in my list of contacts.

And that was about it. Since Google Wave isn’t open to the public, you can’t just start using it with your friends – unless they’ve been invited to test already or you have some invites that you can give away yourself. As Google Wave preview reviews have pointed out, I almost started wondering if this was really some sort of social experiment, since I’d have to get friendly with these arbitrary contacts if I wanted to be able to give the ol’ Wave a go.

I ended up sending my first wave on November 30th, but neither of my contacts bothered to respond to me. I gave it a week or so and finally decided to send a Wave to the Google dude in my contacts, maybe he’d actually reply or something?

I told him that my contacts weren’t responding, what I got back from him was a whack of about 25 invitations that i could send out to people I know – now this is starting to get good right?

Not really. You see, I decided to be Mr. nice guy and invite some co-workers. I figured Google Wave would be a great way for my department to collaborate on stuff like departmental procedures or perhaps have a fully involved discussion over where to get our next pizza lunch from. Out of 6 others in my department, only one was interested in being sent an invite. I canvassed a few others at work and I got smiles and looks of interest, but once I sent out the invites NOBODY has yet hooked up with me on Gwave. Here is my lame screenshot showing how boring my Google Wave screen is at present.

For whatever reason, nobody I know wants to even touch Google Wave with a stick. I’m not sure why – I think most of them don’t even know what it is or what it does. It doesn’t look overly impressive I admit, basically like a vanilla version of Gmail – but the functionality built into it is pretty amazing. However I can’t speak of it from actual experience because I currently have zero!

So if you want to take pity on me and are actually interested in testing out G Wave for yourself, drop me a comment and you could end up with one of the dozen or so invites that I have left.

Last I heard, Google Wave was supposed to go live before 2010 – well, here we are and as far as I know it’s still off limits to the general public. If you ever wanted to be ahead of the bandwagon for a change – now’s your chance. Leave a comment below with your email and I’ll hook you up!

I’ll post again on Google Wave once I’ve actually had a chance to experience it.